Newsweek: He Protests Too Much—India is already going green.

He Protests Too Much

India is already going green.

By David G. Victor | NEWSWEEK
Published Aug 1, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Aug 17, 2009

Hillary Clinton's meeting with Jairam Ramesh was an awkward moment in an otherwise smooth visit to India last month. The Indian environment minister lectured Clinton that India would not commit to cuts in its emissions of the gases that cause global warming. India has other priorities, he said, such as getting electricity to 400 million poor people in the hinterlands.

The scolding followed a familiar script, in which India rebuffs any rich nation that tries to impose limits on its economic growth. But Ramesh was battling a straw man. The U.S. is urging India to follow a less emissions-intensive pattern of growth, not to make painful cuts. Ramesh made India look much more recalcitrant, and less green, than it really is.

India has embarked on an agenda of reforms—partly with help from the United States, but mainly for its own internal reasons—that is already putting it on a path to lower emissions. The government is implementing big programs on energy efficiency, and Clinton met with Ramesh at one of the visible signs of that program's success: a new energy-efficient office building. Some Indian states are already world leaders in renewable-energy technologies such as wind power.

Even in coal, where India's emissions are growing most rapidly, the country is making progress. New rules mean that about one fifth of India's new coal plants will be among the efficient (so-called supercritical) plants that are standard fare in much of the rest of the world. Shortages in coal, which supplies about three quarters of India's electricity, are forcing India to accelerate this trend to higher efficiency. Clinton's visit, like those of several high-ranking U.S. officials over the last decade, included offers of joint research and development that could accelerate India's move to higher-efficiency coal combustion. The details, however, are still too vague, and, in general, Western governments are spending too much time pushing exotic new technologies and not enough on practical steps to speed the spread of technologies that are already available. Western pressure groups that abhor coal in any form also often stand in the way of helping the world use its coal most efficiently.

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